Roussospiti and Mt Vrissinas

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I have taken a day to wander just south of Rethymnon on a bike. In this area, there is a tiny pretty town, Roussospiti. I was curious about the name of the town. I know ‘spiti’ means ‘house’, but I couldn’t understand what the name referred to. My query at the taverna got a couple of locals quite animated. There are at least two competing stories: one is that the town was named after a red house, (in Italian, that’s ‘Rossa’), which was built by a Venetian merchant. The other story says that the name of the town refers to a house built by a Russian woman (hence ‘Rousso’), who was very ill and came to Crete to recover from her ailments. Apparently, her house still exists.

Beyond the lively taverna and the gossip, the reason for my wander to this part of Crete today is visiting a number of lovely churches with Byzantine icons and frescoes I wanted to see, which are nearby, and going up Mt Vrissinas. Wonderfully helpful staff at Karma Travel helpmed me find a place to rent a bike, and also advised on possible routes I could enjoy. This proved to be a great tip. Starting in Rethymnon and on the way to Roussospiti, I passed several lovely chapels worth stopping by to take a look at. This route is best enjoyed on a bike, as the walk would’ve been too long, and going by car or public transport would have meant that I could not stop to see these lovely chapels on the way.

In Roussospiti, there is a 10th century church dedicated to the Mother of God, which hosts some ancient icons that are sadly not intact, as the eyes of saints depicted were scratched during the Turkish occupation. Nearby, just by the entrance to a gorge, there is also a 14th century convent dedicated to Agia Eirini (Holy Peace). The monastery is being reconstructed all thanks to the nuns’ keen efforts, with works ongoing since 1989. The nuns sell beautiful home textiles (like tablecloths and tea towels) and hand-painted icons to sustain their titanic reconstruction work. In the estate of their monastery, there is also a 15th century church dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin, which is also looked after by these dedicated nuns.

At the top of Mt Vrissinas, there is a church dedicated to the Holy Ghost. The view from up the mountain is amazing. It took me some effort going up, even though it’s not particularly high. Anyhow, the bike stayed at the foot of the mountain, and I walked up.

I’m told that this was always considered a holy mountain. Before the existing chapel was built, there seems to have been a temple to goddess Artemis at the same site. Even before this, excavations undertaken in the 1960s revealed a Minoan temple of significance. The digs yielded hundreds of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic clay statuettes, as well as fragments of a stone vase with Linear A inscriptions, which can be seen in the Museum of Rethymnon.